Composing Qualitative Research

Citation

Hogg, M.K. (2008), "Composing Qualitative Research", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 439-443. https://doi.org/10.1108/13522750810901538

This is a short but superb book which was recommended to me by Professor Paul Jackson (Manchester Business School) because it had helped so many of his doctoral students in writing up their qualitative work. In their 2007 book Golden‐Biddle and Locke take the process of reflection (begun in their Organization Science, Golden‐Biddle and Locke, 1993, article) a step further by analyzing how organizational researchers using qualitative data go about composing well‐founded theorized storylines for audiences which traditionally rely on more positivist type tests of the soundness of research.

In their introduction, Golden‐Biddle and Locke discuss “writing about writing,” including writing about fieldwork, focusing on “the theorized storyline” and how they have organized their chapters. The connection between data and theory is a question which they come back to again and again throughout their text. However, they begin by identifying a series of difficult questions, which translate well into issues which marketing academics would easily recognize from the practitioner world of marketing:

• •

  “How do we see the most interesting questions arising from our research?” Golden‐Biddle and Locke (2007, p. 1), i.e. for marketing academics: what is going to be the unique selling proposition of our study?

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  “How do we choose the best theoretical location for our work? Golden‐Biddle and Locke (2007, p. 1), i.e. for marketing academics: how do we best position our research product?

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  How do we convey the meaning of our work – its significance and import – so that it resonates with readers” Golden‐Biddle and Locke (2007, p. 1), i.e. for marketing academics: what is the best communication strategy to use to convince our audience of the value of our research?

Golden‐Biddle and Locke's text is not entirely irrelevant for positivist researchers in marketing as it offers them important insights into how their interpretivist marketing colleagues work in their non‐positivist paradigms, seeking to make the links between data and theory. The research streams within interpretivism use a variety of methodological approaches and embrace two different epistemological views, constructionism and subjectivism. Crotty (1998) provides an insightful discussion of how world views epistemology (including ontology), i.e. objectivism, constructionism and subjectivism (and their variants), theoretical perspective methodology and methods fit together. Interpretivist researchers face a number of challenges as storytellers as they piece together the pieces of their dataset jigsaws for their marketing audiences.

The main jigsaw puzzle that Golden‐Biddle and Locke's text addresses is how researchers working with qualitative data sets tell theoretical stories from their empirical data. Chapter 1, “The style and practice of our academic writing” specifically suggests that “our major writing task [as qualitative researchers] is to convert our engagement with the field into theoretical insights and ideas of interest and import to a disciplinary audience” (2007, p. 7). They identify that even the predominant style of academic writing “unadorned and disembodied” (2007, p. 10) represents rhetoric. All academic writing sets out to persuade. As Golden‐Biddle and Locke conclude “As soon as we frame ideas and craft theoretically relevant insights into claims for presentation to some audience, we are engaging in rhetoric or persuasive discourse” (2007, p. 19). The writing task for qualitative researchers eager to engage their audience involves four components:

1. 1.

   Articulating theoretically relevant insights gained from our field engagement with a particular social and cultural world […]

2. 2.

   Identifying and shaping a contribution site as we connect these insights and extant literature in articulating knowledge claims […]

3. 3.

   Authoritatively arguing the uniqueness and value of our theorized storyline by highlighting the literature's limitations and showing how our study addresses those limitations […]

4. 4.

   Characterizing ourselves as academic storytellers who are members of the professional community in good standing […] (2007, p. 23).

This advice resonates with Arnould's (2003) guidelines to aspiring authors for such top US journals as the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). How to identify the research gap, in order to frame the problem and from there to develop a theorized storyline, as Eric Arnould advocates, is the focus of Golden‐Biddle and Locke's Chapter 2.

Chapter 2, “Crafting a theorized storyline” is foundational to the arguments developed by Golden‐Biddle and Locke. They illustrate four rhetorical moves used by authors to establish theorized storylines: “articulating study significance, situating the study in the literature, problematizing the literature through gap creation, and making space for the study to contribute by foreshadowing how it addresses problematization” (2007, p. 7). These issues all relate to positioning. For the first rhetorical move, articulating the significance of the study, authors place their study in relation to something else because “significance requires contextualization” (2007, p. 31). In the second rhetorical move the authors “re‐present and organize existing knowledge” in order to make clear the research gap which they were addressing. At this stage the authors “variously construe the extant literature as synthesized, progressive and non‐coherent” (2007, p. 31). The third rhetorical move involves: “problematizing the literature, the articles subvert the very literature that they constructed by identifying a problem variously construed as a gap, an oversight, or a misdirection” (2007, p. 31). Golden‐Biddle and Locke identify nine different ways that the literature was used by authors in order to craft a theorized storyline. The fourth and final move involves the “insertion of the study into the space created by the earlier [three] moves” (2007, p. 44).

Chapter 3, “Developing the theorized storyline” draws on a range of studies to illustrate how authors link theory to data. Golden‐Biddle and Locke argue that qualitative researchers no longer need to confine “findings” to “a single section with that heading” (2007, 47). This is in contrast to the presentation of data in the more conventional mode favoured by researchers working in the more positivist‐based traditions, i.e. description of the findings, followed by various levels of data analysis, and then interpretation and discussion. Golden‐Biddle and Locke examine four representational innovations, and the associated solutions, that qualitative researchers have used in writing up their theorized stories for their disciplinary audience. The first innovation centres on “compelling beginnings” and the importance of the opening lines and sections (which Arnould, 2003 also clearly indicates in his advice to aspiring JCR authors). Introducing the sense of the fieldwork and empirical data so early in the article “piques readers' expectations” that they will be hearing about real and interesting organizational situations (2007, p. 48). The second innovation involves a novel use of methodology sections, often renaming the section (e.g. research setting, research site, field site) and re‐arranging the space traditionally allocated for methodology sections by incorporating a description of the field itself in order to enrich the context for the emerging story for their readers derived from the data collection and analyses (2007, p. 51). The third innovation is around the coupling of data and theory. Wayne Booth (1961) made an important distinction between “showing” and “telling” in building the theoretical story:

The “accumulation of accurately observed detail cannot satisfy us for long; only if the details are made to tell, only if they are weighted with a significance” (Booth, 1961, p. 114) do they hold attention. We show data and tell their significance (Golden‐Biddle and Locke, 2007, p. 53 [emphases added] ).

Golden‐Biddle and Locke describe the variety of ways used by authors to combine showing and telling in building their theorized story lines: telling, showing and telling (pp. 53‐55); and minimal telling, showing, telling, more general telling (pp. 55‐7). Examples of both these different approaches can be found in the qualitative articles in JCR, showing how these techniques have crossed subject boundaries within the social sciences. The fourth and final innovation is: storylines with field and theory complications. Researchers traditionally have had to indicate the originality of their contributions in terms of theory‐building; however organizational researchers are increasingly also articulating “a field‐based complication” which means that authors portray “theoretical significance as well as ‘real‐life’ significance” (2007, p. 57) in describing the contribution of their study to their field.

Chapter 4, “Characterizing the storyteller” discusses:

[…] two significant dimensions of characterizing the storyteller in our work; how authors portray themselves in their work, and whether or not audiences regard this portrait of the author as consistent with their expectations (2007, p. 61).

Chapter 5, “Re‐writing the story” examines writing as a social process, focusing on how manuscripts are crafted and recrafted en route to publication. There are some very interesting case studies in this chapter of how authors reworked their various drafts in response to editors' guidance and reviewers' comments in order to reach the publication stage. Authors of 13 different manuscripts (listed in Table 5.1 “Profiled Articles” pp. 82‐83) shared the “traces” of their review processes with Golden‐Biddle and Locke. Golden‐Biddle and Locke use this dataset of 13 articles to distil some key insights about the processes of re‐writing manuscripts. Marketing academics from the subfield of consumer behaviour will be very interested to see that JCR is also now endeavouring to throw some light on the processes of journal reviewing and writing by posting a series of teaching cases on their web site which illustrate how three sets of authors (at the time of writing) responded to various rounds of reviewers' comments in crafting their papers for publication (http://jcr.wisc.edu/teaching‐sets/teachingsets.html).

Finally, “Concluding comments” fall under three headings: writing and re‐writing; sharing; and reading. In terms of the processes involved in writing and re‐writing as we work through our datasets to produce theoretically interesting insights, Smith's (2002) paper is commended for “portraying the personal sensemaking journey in developing her research for publication.” Sharing “helps to break the silence, and creates support for this lengthy process [of writing]” (2007, p. 115). Sharing is endorsed as a very important part of the scholarly process, helping to reduce the isolation and loneliness often associated with academic endeavours, but also offering an important source of potential insights as we develop our ideas. And lastly, reading “helps us develop our own writing style and voice” as we learn to link data and theory together to build our own theorized story lines, becoming more experienced storytellers of our stories.

Margaret K. Hogg

Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, UK

About the author

Margaret K. Hogg is a Professor of Consumer Behaviour and Marketing at Lancaster University Management School. Identity, self and consumption form the crux of her research interests. As a trained historian, she works in the interpretivist tradition using a variety of methods to collect and interpret qualitative data. Some of her most important work (along with Dr Emma Banister, LUMS) has been on the role of the negative self and distastes in understanding consumption choices. She has published in Journal of Business Research, Advances in Consumer Research, Consumption, Markets and Culture, European Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Management. She is a co‐author on the best selling European edition of Consumer Behaviour (2006, Pearson) with Solomon, Bamossy and Askegaard. Margaret K. Hogg can be contacted at: m.hogg@lancaster.ac.uk